History repeats

A couple weeks back I finished up reading Before The Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which I recommend as heartily as I recommended Nixonland, Perlstein's other more recent book. Before the Storm is a close look at the earliest days of the conservative revolution, back when Reagan was still a celebrity and American mid-century consensus liberalism was at its peak. Perlstein is, as I'm sure I've mentioned several times to you guys, a very talented writer and researcher, and has a knack for recognizing important political events in history that we overlook when we try to understand the American scene as it stands today. In particular, he argues that the 1960s have been widely misinterpreted as a time of leftward social movement, when in reality a much stronger rightwards backlash was developing, one that would have a huge effect on American politics for the next 40+ years. Listening to the health care debates right now, it's hard to disagree with him.

Another great thing about his research is that it is very, very difficult to read Perlstein and not see direct contemporary parallels. The conservative movement in particular is a rich yet troubling source of deja vu - the perpetual allusions to communists or subversives, the fears of indoctrination, the hypocritical acceptance of and contempt towards government funding, and so on. Many have argued that the extreme and increasingly hostile tilt of the conservative base in America today is a product of a movement that has run out of ideas and out of gas, and that it is somehow a distortion of what true conservatism really is or was. Reading Perlstein, however, casts some cold water on this idea. Unfortunately, it also casts cold water on the idea that tea-baggers and Birthers and dittoheads and Glenn Beck are suggestive of an endangered mode of thinking, rather than one that is simply on the outs waiting for its way back in.

The latest deja vu moment for me came earlier today, as I read this post at a site called The Next Right. In short summary, the author, Jon Henke, more or less demanded a boycott on WorldNetDaily, a site that combines far-right outrage with more crassly commercial forms of snake-oil ("Secrets most men will never know about self-defense. Discover what martial artists and the military don’t want you to be aware of" shares page space with "Obama under massive fire for speech to students. Florida GOP: Attempt to 'indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda'"). In response, Henke's fellow conservatives offered their sincerest thanks:

Jon,I hope you get a triple case of AIDS the next time you take it up the a**, you f*****g homo. You and your putrid ilk put that Comie n****r in the White House and accidently woke up the silent majority of white, Christain, tax-paying Americans. No longer will the soul of this great nation be intimidated by political correctness. You f****d up buddy and now you have a front row seat to see the newly awakened vanquish the cancer of fascism from this land. Oh, by the by, I do hope to meet you in person some day for a bit of attitude adjustment.Semper Fi, Motherf****r.

Now, I read the follow-up post before reading the original, but apparently my mind strayed immediately to the same historical comparison Henke did, as he pointed out that "in the 1960's, William F. Buckley denounced the John Birch Society leadership for being "so far removed from common sense" and later said "We cannot allow the emblem of irresponsibility to attach to the conservative banner."" The Birchers, much like today's Birthers, were a fairly active and surprisingly well-connected group of right-wing conspiracy theorists who, in a troubling paradox for the nascent conservative movement, were both an embarrassment and an excellent source of cash. Buckley, who had only just started up National Review, took it upon himself to throw them overboard, starting a decades-long and still-present split between the activist right and the slightly more moderate conservative elite.

Now, while Henke favourably casts himself as Buckley in this scenario, I'm interpreting this in a slightly different light. In short, the Birchers may have been tossed out by Buckley, but they remained an active and integral part of the Republican machine nonetheless. The process of expunging them only really served to reassure a moderate public that being a conservative wasn't such a horrible thing. Meanwhile, just as today, a significant portion of the movement remained nutso, and that significant portion kept voting and rallying and raising money. So while I wish Henke all the best in his endeavour, history suggests it just won't happen. Whether that means anything in terms of the Republican party's long-term health is the real question.